Sorry, Ladies, But You Have No Choice

Ladies, You Have No Choice

How extremists took over U.S. family planning policy

Every Friday morning, Stirling
Scruggs receives a fax that the sender, an organization called C-FAM, may or
may not have intended for him to receive. C-FAM is the Catholic Family and
Human Rights Institute, based in New York near the United Nations, a behind-the-scenes
anti-abortion group that has established itself as one of the most vociferous
factions in the U.S. culture wars. Scruggs, who grew up in Tennessee and looks
more like a country-western singer than a man who oversees an entire UN
division, doesn't at all like what he sees. It's his job, as director of the
Information and External Relations Division of the United Nations Population
Fund (UNFPA), to watch out for disinformation being disseminated through the
United States and abroad by a network of shadowy anti-choice organizations of
which C-FAM is one. What he sees coming in today is a doozie.

The newly arrived fax alleges that the UN Population Fund
was complicit in the forced sterilizations of poor, indigenous women in Peru
during the presidency of Alberto Fujimori. The allegation comes from another
group in the network, called the Population Research Institute (PRI), which is
based in the horse-country town of Front Royal, Virginia. This assertion, says
Scruggs, is "total fiction." C-FAM, he says, is passing along PRI's charges as
part of an orchestrated campaign to discredit the UN in general and UNFPA in particular.
He points out that PRI has included no substantiation for these charges.
Wasting no time, he gets on the phone to his UNFPA colleagues in Lima, alerting
them to the inevitable ruckus this story will cause, and requesting that they
coordinate any response with his office.

C-FAM's use of fax rather than e-mail may seem quaint, but
the group's influence is both calculated and potent. The "Friday Fax of
Misinformation," as Scruggs ruefully calls it, is circulated to a network of
other, like-minded, groups that will in turn do their best to provoke the rage
of fellow anti-abortionists all over the world. It also goes to certain members
of the U.S. Congress and selected members of the media who can be counted on to
promote the group's anti-choice agenda.

That agenda, says the UN's Scruggs, is not simply to oppose
abortion. Rather, the anti-abortion rhetoric is a kind of code for something
more pervasive. "These groups are not just anti-abortion, they are anti-women,
and oppose population policies and programs in general," says Scruggs. "They
hate us because we have been very effective in promoting women's rights and
providing poor communities with the information and means to voluntarily plan
their families. The pity is that refuting these lies takes up valuable staff
time-time we could be using to carry out our primary mandate, saving the lives
of poor women, men, and adolescents."

Behind their innocuous-sounding names and claims to
represent "pro-life" interests, C-FAM and its network of like-minded groups-others
include the Pro-Life Action League, American Life League, Campaign Life
Coalition, Concerned Women for America, and National Right to Life
Committee-have lobbied heavily against women's rights to make their own
decisions about having or not having children. C-FAM was established ostensibly
to monitor UN activities in the population and reproductive health fields. But
according to investigations carried out by other groups, including Catholics
for a Free Choice, what C-FAM really does is orchestrate misinformation
campaigns against the UN system, disrupt meetings, and brand all specialized
agencies and NGOs engaged in reproductive health and family planning
initiatives in developing countries as "anti-family."

C-FAM's president, Austin Ruse, is one of a growing number
of figures who are apparently bent on undermining all aid to developing
countries by organizations that even mention the words "family planning,"
"reproductive health," "women's rights," or "free, informed choice." He has
reportedly told supporters that reproductive health is just a "cover-up for
abortionists" and that efforts to achieve reproductive health and establish
rights for poor women is a "feminist conspiracy" to "destroy the family."

A particular target,
for Ruse, is the Beijing Platform of Action, a product of the Fourth World
Conference on Women, held in Beijing, China, in 1995. In the typically bland
but well-meaning language of UN delegates everywhere, the Platform calls for
actions "to eradicate persistent and increasing burden of poverty on women; to
remove the obstacles to women's full participation in public life and
decision-making; to eliminate all forms of violence against women; to ensure
equal access for girl children and women to education and health services; to promote
economic autonomy for women; and to encourage an equitable sharing of family
responsibilities." To Ruse, this is "one of the most radical and dangerous
documents you can imagine" (italics added).

It's not clear whether Ruse is one of those Montana-style
militants who believe the UN storm troopers will arrive by night in black
helicopters (New York is not Montana, after all), but he's by no means alone.
Nor is his characterization of the Beijing Platform as "dangerous" a thing that
people like Scruggs can just shrug off. C-FAM and the Population Research
Institute are part of a tightly woven group of organizations bent on
"dismantling 30 years of progress in population assistance," says a USAID
(Agency for International Development) official who prefers anonymity. Both
organizations were founded and financed by the same parent organization-Human
Life International (HLI), an offspring of Human Life International Canada. The
offices of Human Life International
are next to PRI's in Front Royal.

The pit-bull of this labyrinthine assemblage is the
Population Research Institute, which was set up in 1989 by Benedictine priest
Father Paul Marx, who at the time was president of Human Life International.
Sometime in the mid-1990s, Marx recruited a man named Steven Mosher to run PRI.
Marx is perhaps best known for his assertion that the success of the abortion
rights movement in the United States and elsewhere is the work of Jews. In a
1993 newsletter to supporters, Marx wrote: "Today, certain members of this people
whose ancient religion and culture managed to survive Auschwitz and Buchenwald
are presiding over the greatest Holocaust in the history of the world. American
Jews have been leaders in establishing and defending the efficient destruction
of more than 30 million preborn [sic] children in this country."

Mosher, the man Marx would later recruit to run PRI, started
out his adult life as an apparently serious student, entering a doctoral
program in anthropology at Stanford University. He was expelled from the
program, however, for having engaged in what the university termed "illegal and
seriously unethical conduct" that "endangered his research subjects." Though it
is unclear what Mosher was initially researching in China, he began to study
the country's population-control practices, which in the 1970s and 1980s were
very harsh. His observations there may have colored his subsequent views, as he
witnessed women being forced to have late-term abortions against their will.
Mosher published photos of some of these women in a magazine in Taiwan, but
neglected to conceal their faces-thereby exposing the practice but also
exposing the women (who could have been seen as cooperating with Mosher) to
retaliation by the Chinese authorities.

Mosher then morphed into his current persona: stridently
anti-abortion and anti-China. He also evidently believes-along with some of
those Montana militiamen-that the UN is a global conspiracy to impose a "new
world order" on the community of nations. Part of that new world order, he says,
is a plan to use family planning as a way to "selectively reduce the population
of the world to a manageable number."

Putting Family Planners in the Crosshairs

During the 1990s, the views of
Mosher, Ruse, and their network made steady but quiet inroads into the thinking
of the increasingly conservative U.S. Congress. As long as Bill Clinton was in
the White House, these views were ignored by the administration. With the
arrival of George W. Bush, however, the balance shifted suddenly. "These groups
have been around for the past decade," points out Richard Snyder, chief of
UNFPA's External Relations Branch. "The difference is that now they have an ear
in the White House." The moment the Supreme Court decided Bush was president,
the anti-choice campaigns moved into high gear. And on his first day in office,
Bush gave them their first reward-reactivating a discredited Reagan-era policy
called the "global gag rule," according to which no organization can receive
U.S. family planning assistance if it performs abortions, provides counseling
and referral for abortions, or lobbies to make abortion legal or more available
in its own country.

The next target to be put in the White House crosshairs was
UNFPA. The Congress allocated $34 million to the Population Fund in 2002. But
then Mosher's PRI issued a report alleging that UNFPA aid funds were being used
for coercive abortions and sterilizations in China. Congressman Chris Smith, a
Republican from New Jersey who made his reputation as a UN basher, became very
excited about the report-even though it actually contained no hard evidence and
seemed to be little more than a bad memory of what Mosher had reported 20 years
earlier. Smith dispatched a letter to Bush urging that the funding be withheld.
Bush, not known for his willingness to be dissuaded from an action by any lack
of hard evidence, decided to withhold the funds. His reason, he said, was the
Kemp-Kasten Amendment to the 1985 foreign aid bill [officially the Foreign
Operations, Export Financing, and Related Programs Appropriations Act], which
stipulates that no funds can be allocated to any organization or program "which
supports or participates in the management of a program of coercive abortion or
sterilization."

The action was denounced by scores of U.S. legislators. One
of them was Carolyn Maloney, a Democratic representative from New York City.
"What I find so outrageous is that Bush withheld this $34 million based solely
on testimony from the Population Research Institute, an arm of a far-right
group," she said. "PRI is the only organization that has ever made these
allegations. The administration is going against the will of Congress and the
international community by allowing a small band of extremists to hamstring its
foreign policy."

The "small band of extremists" is doing more than
hamstringing U.S. foreign policy. PRI and its spawn are attempting to remake
policy to fit their own triumphal new world order-in hopes of reversing decades
of progress by UN agencies, NGOs, and community groups. Operating mainly behind
the scenes, they have helped to persuade the Bush administration to
systematically de-fund the main international organizations that work in the
field of reproductive health and family planning.

The campaign began even before Bush moved in. Bill Clinton
had pledged to raise U.S. contributions to $1 billion a year for UN agencies
and NGOs that provide critically needed reproductive health and family planning
services, but was unable to get a Republican-controlled Congress to authorize
the funding. In 2002, the Global Health Council reported that between 1995 and
2002 the shortfall in funding had resulted in an estimated 300 million
unintended pregnancies and the deaths of close to 1 million women from botched
abortions and pregnancy-related illnesses and complications. The World Health
Organization confirmed that over half a million women die every year from
pregnancy-related causes, and that 90 percent of those deaths could be
prevented if the women had access to trained health care providers or emergency
obstetric services.

From the day Bush first sat down in the Oval Office, his
decisions in the areas of family planning and population appear to have been
guided solely by ideology, with little interest in what is actually happening
in developing countries. After the delivery of the PRI report on China, for
example, several high-level independent delegations were sent to China to look
into the charges PRI had made, and their findings were sent to Bush-but were
ignored.

Niek Biegman, former Dutch ambassador to NATO with a long
history of UN service, headed the first delegation, under UN auspices. Upon his
return, Biegman wrote that "UNFPA is very much in the business of helping the
Chinese government fulfill its obligation under the Cairo Programme of Action,
which is entirely based on a voluntary approach to family planning" (italics
added). In the 32 pilot counties where UNFPA is working with the National
Population and Family Planning Commission to eliminate targets and quotas and
introduce improvements in service delivery, including access to a wide range of
contraceptives, Biegman observed that the Fund was "enabling Chinese family
planning programs to deliver better quality services, based on choice and
informed consent." China has changed greatly since the 1980s, but in Steven
Mosher's mind-and now in Bush's-the nightmare goes on.

Biegman's investigation was not the only one to find a
gaping disparity between the White House view and reality. Three other major
independent missions have confirmed Biegman's findings. In April 2002, a
three-member group of British parliamentarians-one of them a conservative
Catholic-visited China and found no evidence of misconduct by UNFPA. The next
month, a three-person team was sent by the U.S. State Department.
Embarrassingly for Bush, the U.S. team found "no evidence that UNFPA has
knowingly supported or participated in the management of a program of coercive
abortion or involuntary sterilization in the PRC. Indeed, UNFPA has registered
its strong opposition to such practices." All told, in the past decade there
have been more than 160 UN monitoring missions to China. None of them confirmed
the PRI report that had so excited Congressman Smith and so galvanized George
Bush.

Another independent mission, organized by Catholics for a
Free Choice, sent a nine-member team of faith-based organization leaders and
ethicists to China in September 2003. Their conclusions were unequivocal: "On
the basis of our meetings with Chinese family planning officials and ordinary citizens,
we can say with confidence that all of the programs with which UNFPA is
currently working are committed to avoiding any practice of forced abortions or
involuntary sterilizations."

Why is the Bush administration so unresponsive to such
findings? One answer is offered by Ronald Green, chairman of the Department of
Religion at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, and a member of the 2003
delegation. "The Bush Administration has made UNFPA a sacrificial lamb for the
religious right in America," says Green. "It's crass election politics. These
groups not only oppose abortion, they are against family planning and
reproductive health in general. Their positions...have no basis in reality."

The Death Toll Your News Channel Doesn't Discuss

Considering the amount of damage
that has resulted from the see-no-research Bush policies-in every area from
maternal mortality to girls' education to healthy parenting-many
Washington-watchers have wondered just why these policies have been applied
with such a vengeance. For Los Angeles Times columnist Robert Scheer, the
reason is clear: "Women in other countries can't vote in U.S. elections," he
writes, "but the members of the National Right to Life Committee not only vote
but also donate to candidates and political action committees.... More than any other in recent memory,
this administration is marked by a foreign policy driven primarily by a
domestic agenda." Brian Dixon, director of government relations for the
Washington, D.C.-based NGO Population Connection, agrees. "Since the first day
of this Bush administration, there has been one guiding principle in its
foreign policy decisions: appeasing the right-wing, anti-choice base. The
result is to undermine the health of women all around the world."

A related explanation for why this anti-female action has
come on so harshly and so hard is that in opening the White House door to
religious guidance (Bush's advisor Karl Rove has set up a "Faith-Based and
Communities Initiative Office" in the White House), the administration has
opened a flood gate. Economist Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Earth Institute
at Columbia University in New York, believes that by letting religious zealots
in the policy door, Bush is fracturing the Constitution. Sachs wrote recently
in New Scientist: "It is more than 200 years since the church and state were
officially separated in the U.S., but anyone with an eye on American foreign
policy under the Bush administration knows that this basic tenet of the
Constitution is under threat." The religious right, he continues, "has found
the ear of the White House to an unprecedented degree. This is especially true
when it comes to U.S. policies on international development, which are riddled
with evangelical opposition to family planning and the use of condoms to fight
HIV/AIDS."

Despite the fact that every scientific study ever to address
the issue has rated condoms as one of the most effective means of halting the
spread of HIV/AIDS and other
sexually transmitted infections (STIs), the Bush regime has entered into an
implicit alliance with the Vatican to preach abstinence-only programs. One
immediate consequence has been a significant drop in the number of condoms
shipped to poor developing countries by USAID, which, under Clinton, was one of
the two largest donors of condoms in the world (the other was UNFPA). According
to Population Action International, an NGO based in Washington, D.C., Bush's
partisan policies have ended life-saving shipments of condoms and other
contraceptive supplies to 16 of the poorest developing countries in Africa,
Asia, and the Pacific. Family planning agencies in another 13 countries, nearly
all in sub-Saharan Africa, no longer get condoms and contraceptives from USAID
because they will not agree to the conditions set forth in the global gag rule.
With funds in short supply, donor governments now provide only one-eighth of
the number of condoms needed to effectively combat the spread of HIV/AIDS.

"These ill-conceived and dangerous policies are costing
human lives, not saving them," comments Steven Sinding, the director-general of
the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF), headquartered in
London. IPPF, the largest voluntary organization in the world that provides
reproductive health and family planning services to women, men and adolescents,
is active in 182 countries. As a result of the Global Gag Rule, the Federation
is losing at least $18 million a year in U.S. funding; $75 million over the
next four to eight years.

IPPF predicts that the number of women who die from unsafe
abortions every year-estimated minimally at 70,000 by the World Health
Organization-will soar due to Bush's policies. Making abortion illegal, or
difficult to obtain, does not stop abortion from happening. In the Philippines,
an overwhelmingly Catholic nation where abortions are completely illegal, IPPF
estimates there are half a million a year. Many of them take place in unsafe,
unsanitary conditions. At just one hospital in Addis Ababa, capital of Ethiopia
- another country where abortion is illegal-a study found that half of all
female deaths were from botched back-street abortions.

Perhaps the ultimate tragedy in this saga is the loss in
reproductive health and family planning services to poor women-ironically, the
very services that can prevent abortions from taking place. IPPF points to just
a few of the programs it had to cut: In Bangladesh 14 clinics in poor
neighborhoods had to be closed; in Nepal, over $700,000 has been lost for
family planning, safe motherhood, and contraceptive services; in Cambodia over
$3 million has been lost for HIV/AIDS
prevention and counseling; in Kenya three clinics servicing 56,000 clients,
mostly poor women of reproductive age, had to close; and in eastern Nepal, the
local branch of IPPF had to close clinics and cut back services for over
300,000 people, endangering their health and welfare.

Other international NGOs with decades of experience
providing quality health services in the poorest regions of developing
countries have also seen their funding shrink as a result of the global gag
rule. Marie Stopes International, for instance, had to close a major clinic
servicing 300,000 people in Kenya's poverty-stricken Mathare Valley. The clinic
provided STI screening and treatment, HIV testing and counseling, and a
complete array of basic family planning and reproductive health care services.
Apparently, it matters not to anti-choice opponents that no abortions were ever
performed at that facility, or that there are no other health clinics in the
entire area. Meanwhile, HIV infection rates in this region, as in the rest of
Africa, are on the rise.

On a much larger
scale, UNFPA calculates that the loss of $34 million, about 13 percent of its
total budget, is having a devastating effect on programs in some of the poorest
countries in which the Fund works. In Bangladesh, where close to 70 percent of
pregnant women receive no medical care before, during, or after childbirth,
programs to train doctors to deal with obstetric emergencies had to be
cancelled. In Kenya, where the Fund was working with the Catholic Church to
prevent teenagers from contracting the HIV virus, the project had to be shelved
when funds dried up. Overall, UNFPA estimates that the loss of U.S. funding
will result in 2 million unwanted pregnancies, 800,000 abortions, and more than
81,000 deaths.

Stirling Scruggs reckons that UNFPA has lost between $500
and $600 million since the fundamental change in U.S. population policy in
1986, funds that could have been used to advance women's health and rights
worldwide. "It is sad when one considers that the U.S. was the prime mover in
creating UNFPA during the Nixon administration," reflects Scruggs. "UNFPA has
become just what the U.S. envisioned, the world's premiere reproductive health
and rights organization." But now, that reputation is in jeopardy-not because
of misdeeds, but because of misinformation. If the tactics practiced by C-FAM
and PRI are any indication of what is to come, "then we are in for a lot more
than false accusations, lost funds, and inflammatory rhetoric," says UNFPA's
Snyder.

Indeed, PRI and other fundamentalist groups are now going
directly into developing countries to spread their misinformation, employing
techniques used by the CIA to discredit governments. Three years ago, PRI sent
Austin Ruse to Pristina in Kosovo with the message that UNFPA was in league
with the Serbs, and that the Fund's family planning services were actually a
form of "ethnic cleansing." Fortunately, a quick reaction from UNFPA and
supporting organizations avoided a potential lethal situation. "We were in a
post-conflict situation, operating in very difficult conditions," recalls
Scruggs. "If that rumor had persisted it could have put our people in the line
of fire."

UNFPA, IPPF, and other international organizations working
in the field of population are girding themselves for worse times ahead. To
IPPF's Steve Sinding, UNFPA's Scruggs, and others who have toiled on the front
lines of development, these cutbacks in funding from the world's richest
country are not just numbers, but human faces-like that of the 25-year-old
woman in the Philippines who died from hemorrhage on her way to a hospital 20
kilometers away because the local clinic didn't have the training or equipment
to stop her from bleeding to death after giving birth to her sixth child in
seven years; or the 20-year-old college student in Botswana who died from AIDS
for lack of a condom; or the adolescent girl from Ethiopia who, forced to give
birth at the tender age of 13, ended up suffering from fistula-a condition in
which a woman's rectum, urethra, and vagina are torn apart during childbirth,
leaving her incontinent and causing bodily wastes to seep through her vaginal
canal and down her legs. According to the UN, nearly half of all women in
developing countries deliver their babies without the aid of a trained medical
attendant or access to emergency obstetric care. "We are dealing with real
people and their unmet needs, not statistics," says Sinding. "These acts are a
testament to the Bush administration's war against women and his overall
contempt for their fundamental civil and human rights."

Don
Hinrichsen is a contributing editor to People & the Planet, a London-based
web magazine.